Hello lovelies,
Bob Dylan said it best:
Oh, where have you been, my blue sky and sun?
Oh, where have you been, darling trails I could run?
I’ve stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains
I’ve walked and I’ve crawled on six crooked highways
I’ve stepped in the middle of seven dead forests…
And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall
Short updates
• Cascade trails!! I’m on the PCT for the next bit as I detour around a closure in the northern part of North Cascades NP. And then so, so many miles of road walking to get to the Olympics
• Genuinely some marvelous hiking these past 100 miles
• I’ve encountered a few more WEBOs, and dozens of PCT NOBOs for the few miles I’ve been on the PCT. I don’t think I’ll see any of them again.
Long updates
Surrounded by sage brush in 91 degree heat, I began walking a highway, moving several tons of fast moving steel out of my way with a nod and a wave. This road would take me around Palmer Lake, before turning to a dirt road that would gain 8000 feet to finally drop me in to the Pasayten Wilderness.
For how many road miles this trail contains, I have to say that the road walk out of Oroville was quite pleasant. I finally hit the desert part of the trail — consisting solely of a 30 mile asphalt road walk. The sun came out, the huckleberries dissipated, and sage became plentiful. Nothing but some road lay between me and glorious trails!
The arid landscape and radiative warmth from the sun meant that my feet were dry as I pounded hard pavement, meandering toward Chopoka Mountain which rose from the desert floor, a seeming behemoth sparsely covered in vegetation. The Similkameen River coursed through the valley beneath me, tempting the parched landscape and all road walkers with its glistening surface, rich in heavy metals and arsenic.
Yet for how dry the landscape is, the Enloe Dam water project was built to heavily subsidize agriculture in the area. Orchards appear from nowhere with acre upon acre of apple trees. A golf course provides the much needed Sunday recreation for individuals emerging from luxury vehicles, while alfalfa and corn crops create green squares in the distance. All irrigated by broken sprinklers spilling hundreds of gallons of water per minute onto the soil, “civilizing” the desert.
“No Trespassing” signs have been ubiquitous since entering Eastern Washington, warning passersby away from private property that contains not much more than dozens of rusted-out vehicles and burned out motor homes and hundreds of tires leaching contaminants into the nearby creek (pronounced crick, locally). Trump/Vance signs are frequently co-located alongside flags, and other political demarcations in support of local GOP politicians, all promising to make America great again.
Yet I think, perhaps, it is the water projects in the west that can best explain the ever-increasing polarization and lack of shared reality we now experience in this country. Large, public infrastructure projects brought to the rural West provided water that was “too cheap to meter”. Due to poor enforcement of water allocation, the countless dams eliminated subsistence farming, the very enterprise they were erected to support, while allowing a handful of large agribusinesses to consolidate holdings and to prosper. Despite the public dollars needed to build these water projects, and that for every $1 spent might only yield 20 cents in cumulative economic value from the surrounding desert agriculture, by damn these projects certainly were something! Huge quantities of concrete rerouting rivers and overhauling the environment, leaving monuments to man’s “ingenuity and mastery” of the world. It’s easy to confuse oneself into thinking that social programs built from concrete are more tangible than Medicaid.
Over a handful of years, congress rallied behind the pork barrel of water projects, funding many thousand dams. Projects in each district were good for each congressperson’s constituents, and the rest of the public paid little attention to the increasing absurdity or questionable value of a project under the presumption that “water is life.”
We wonder why we can’t build anything anymore. Why California’s high-speed rail is over budget and decades behind schedule. It’s because water projects grew increasingly absurd and uneconomical, while destroying valued species and spaces and transferring huge swaths of wealth to big business. The public finally spearheaded the use of the Endangered Species Act to slow down the building of dams. NEPA and CEQA also came into their own to ensure that public works projects would grind to halt, taking longer to complete than a single political term. Meanwhile, climate change adaptation and mitigation will both require incalculably large constructions over the next several decades. Perhaps new forms of concrete welfare programs are needed. Is it possible to responsibly reawaken America’s public works engine?
As I continued along the desert highway toward the Pasayten, trail magic seemed to manifest every 5 miles. The following morning, I rounded a corner into the Pasayten Wilderness and Thor’s hammer range out, rebounding across the peaks. I counted lightning intervals as I raced the remaining 2000 feet up and exposed ridge to a saddle conveniently shrouded in trees. I asked Thor to continue his smithing in a different valley. Surprisingly he obliged, but the rain remained. The temperature soon dropped 40 degrees. I walked down a ridge then up another peak to a fresh dusting of snow. The snow turned to slush, further inundating my shoes. I was no longer in an arid Washington, but there was beautiful scenery abound!
The PNT sure can make you greatly appreciate the lovely grades and picturesque peaks of the PCT.
With love for some miles from the PCT,
Jeff